What does God think of you?

God thinks of you as the royal priest he created you to be serving in his temple-palace of creation. God has never thought of you as anything else. Even in rebellion against him, denying or ignoring your royal priesthood, he has never accepted or thought of you in terms of what you have become, sinners, but always in terms of who he made you to be. Of course he knows you have gone wrong and that this has to dealt with. And God has done that in Christ – once for all time! And having done it, he never thinks of us in terms of sin and failure again. Only as his beloved children, children of the Great King, royal siblings, those to whom he has entrusted and equipped for the protection and care of his creation.

When you next look in the mirror, behold there this you – not whatever other you you may believe yourself to be! For this is the true you, the real you, the you God created you to be.

And if you don’t believe me, maybe these wise words of the great theologian Karl Barth will help:

“[Man’s] legal status as a sinner is rejected in every form. Man is no longer seriously regarded by God as a sinner. Whatever he may be, whatever there is to be said of him, whatever he has to reproach himself with, God no longer takes him seriously as a sinner. He has died to sin; there on the Cross of Golgotha…We are no longer addressed and regarded by God as sinners…We are acquitted gratis, sola gratia, by God’s own entering in for us.” (Dogmatics in Outline)

If you can begin to see yourself, and everyone else you meet, like this, as God does, it will change your life! And isn’t that what Advent is all about anyway?